BioCentury This Week: Resetting Perceptions of the Possible

DARPA jump-started the Internet. Now it’s tackling something really complicated — the human body.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency pursues life science projects that are rooted in military needs — like the threat of microbes or brain injury in the battlefield. But with a budget of almost $400 million a year, DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office also promises to transform civilian medicine.

DARPA is known for pioneering advanced robotics from the battlefield to the operating room. Now its life science interests are reaching even further out.

•	It has helped fund Foldit, a crowd-sourced online game that has attracted 240,000 players to solve complex three-dimensional protein folding problems.
•	Its Microphysiological System project is using engineered human tissue to mimic human physiological systems.
•	Its REMIND project seeks to recover short-term memory.
•	Its ADEPT project aims to build “diagnostics on demand.”

On the newest edition of BioCentury This Week television, Dr. Jay Schnitzer, the head of the Defense Sciences Office, describes where DARPA hopes to revolutionize biomedical science.

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BioCentury This Week is a partnership of BioCentury Publications and W*USA, the Gannett-owned CBS affiliate serving the Washington, D.C., market. The program is part of the “Sunday Power Block” lineup, which includes Platts Energy Week; CBS Sunday Morning; Face the Nation; This Week in Defense News and The McLaughlin Group.
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